License

SQL: Old Soldiers Never Die

2008/06/25 — grant czerepak

Structured Query Language (SQL) has been a phenomenally useful language for the relational database era. But I see that era coming to a close.

One of the primary flaws is SQL allows for database Alters, Drops, Updates and Deletes. When diskspace was expensive this made perfect sense, but with the unlimited disk resources we have today a greater principle holds true: NO SCHEMA OR DATA SHOULD BE ALTERED, DROPPED, UPDATED OR DELETED.

A second flaw is the lack of interactive modification of the schema in real time. Changes still blow most applications all to hell.

A third flaw is supertype/subtype hierarchies. Such things should not be hard coded into a design.

That being the case SQL has four unnecessary statements just waiting to be abused. We need a better language. In fact, we need a better database architecture.

A new language would provide no means for updates or deletes. I created the first Releases of this language I called “Structured Thinking Language” (STL).

STL has the following commands:

CREATE – affordance concept (creates entities)

DIRECT – affordance context (relates entities)

POSIT – affordance method (entity output)

OBJECT – affordance pragma (entity input)

NEGATE – affordance cosmos (entity security)

INTUIT – affordance chronos (entity manipulation)

As you can see there are no means to delete data.

Each entity (noun) has only one “attribute” in the relational ERD sense and each entity value is unique.

Each relationship between entities is called an direction with a subject, verb and object.

What we are actually dealing with is a database that has data states. Data being no longer affected by Alters and Deletes are instead affected by change of state without physical alteration or deletion.

After looking at STL recently I realized I had created a command language for an existing database architecture: The Associative Model of Data by Simon Williams.

The Book on the Model and a free copy of the Enterprise Edition software is available here.